Configuring 6224 for redundancy (with load balancing) with different private wan providers

MarianoC

15 pts.

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Cisco Routers

Dell PowerConnect

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WAN

Hi,

We have different locations connected by two different WAN providers. Each site has a 6224 and two cisco routers with the WAN connections (we don’t have access to router admin). The 6224 connects to each cisco LAN port and to our LAN backbone. We would like the 6224 provide the ip gateway address and load balance and support redundancy, if one of the routes fail. I think we should use gpre/gre to establish route end points to the remote 6224 vlans and then add routes based on that. We can't find any samples on doing this and we have tried with no success. Any help or link to documentation regarding this, will be greatly appreciated.

Thanks,

MarianoC

Software/Hardware used:
PowerConnect 6224

Asked: June 1, 2010 1:22 PM Last updated: June 2, 2010 4:43 PM

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Last updated: June 2, 2010 1:13 AM GMT

Matt Mather3,610 pts.
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- Matt Mather3,610 pts.

Thanks. We'll let you know when a new response is added.

From what I have read the Dell PowerConnect 6224 switches do not support GRE and therefore you will not be able to do what you are suggesting. Please, correct me if I am wrong?!

You could look to enable, if it isn’t already, IP routing on the switches as they can perform layer 3 functions. With this enabled you could have equally weighted routes to each of your provider routers LAN IP addresses which would resolve your load balancing issues but it certainly wouldn’t be resilient.

For resilience you would need to look at altering the configuration of the routers as well and use another protocol like GLBP between them and from your switch perspective route to the virtual IP configured between the 2 routers. The router themselves could be configured to track external routes or line protocol in order to stop forwarding in the event of a failure.

It can be a challenge to set up if you don’t have access to the routers though 🙁

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MarianoC Jun 2, 2010 11:35 AM GMT

Hi Matt, Thanks for the answer. Yes, I think I can't do it with enabling some routing exchange. I will think on other solution. The idea is to be "independent" of the wan link providers, in fact one of the network is an MPLS an d the other a plain IP network. If we change one f those in nthe future we would like to do it making changes on our side. I will post here when I decide an option. Thanks, MarianoC.

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Matt Mather Jun 2, 2010 4:43 PM GMT

I can see where you are coming from with the need to be independent of your service providers and why you decided that GRE could be an option. Be aware though that even with GRE that there are some performance limitations and potential MTU oddities with GRE tunnels, definitely something to look out for should you look to implement additional equipment to support GRE.

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